Homework

Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo recorded Homework at Daft House, the studio in their Paris flat, across 1994 and 1996. Virgin and Soma Quality Recordings released it in Europe on 20 January 1997. The United States followed on 25 March. The title is a job description. Two people made a house record at home, and a major got to ship it.

The record a DJ already knew was older than the album. Da Funk, backed with Rollin’ & Scratchin’, came out on Soma on 8 May 1995. Indo Silver Club followed on 26 February 1996. Virgin signed the duo in 1996, once those singles had started a bidding war, and the masters stayed with Daft Trax. The company that put the CD in the shops did not own the recordings. That split is the whole story of how a specialist 12-inch became a worldwide album without the people who made it handing over the tapes.

Soma’s claim on them starts before the war. In 1993 they played a demo, including Alive, to Stuart Macmillan at a rave at Disneyland Paris. Soma, the Glasgow label Macmillan’s group Slam had co-founded in 1991, issued that cassette as The New Wave on 11 April 1994. Richard Brown at Soma has described losing them to Virgin as sad and rare: a band getting a major chance after two singles. Virgin then reissued Da Funk in 1996 with Musique on the flip, a B-side Bangalter has said was never meant for the album. He has also said the Da Funk single sold more copies than Homework, so more people owned the riff from the 12-inch than from the LP. Spike Jonze, who directed the Da Funk video, put the same fact in plainer clothes. They were doing it the way they wanted, rather than taking the plan that came with the signature. The shop record and the DJ record were already two different objects.

They sequenced the album to fill the four sides of a double vinyl LP, and they asked for a small CD run at the start, about 50,000, because they wanted the object to be mostly vinyl. Shops corrected them. Nilesh Patel mastered it at the Exchange in London. France put the album at number 3. Britain put it at number 8. By February 2001 Virgin was counting more than two million copies. None of those figures is why someone still drops Da Funk when a room is half empty and needs a riff.

The sequence puts a rave and a flat in the same hour. Daftendirekt, the opener, is taken from a live recording at the first I Love Techno, in Ghent, on 10 November 1995. Around the World is one sung phrase, a disco bassline, a small keyboard figure, and a filter that opens and closes like a hand on a tap. Da Funk sits on a figure from Vaughan Mason & Crew’s Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll and plays it as a joke you can still feel in the chest. Teachers is a roll call over a Dance Mania rhythm, naming the house producers the duo treated as faculty, Romanthony and Todd Edwards among them. Revolution 909 begins with the sound of a police raid and then refuses to stop, which is the only argument a dance track knows how to finish. Funk Ad, at the end, is Da Funk run backwards.

French house, in 1995, was a Paris fact: a few labels, a few flats, a filter, a bassline stolen in plain sight from disco. Homework did not invent the method. It put the method on a Virgin sleeve and let everyone else catch up to a room in Paris. The helmets came later. The loop was already finished.

Sources

• Homework: Europe 20 January 1997, United States 25 March 1997, Daft House, Soma and Virgin, Da Funk on 8 May 1995, charts, the early CD run, Daft Trax.
• Discogs master for Daft Punk, Homework, including the Virgin and Soma pressings and the double vinyl.